Data Silos: A Big Problem In HR That Needs To Be Fixed

Welcome to the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Vantage Circle, the simple and AI powered rewards and recognition platform for employee engagement. Breaking down silos and unifying all of their operational and experience data is a top priority for many companies today. As you listen to this podcast, you will be able to realize where your company has data silos, and how you can improve your data integration.

Susmita Sarma: Hi everyone, I'm Susmita and I'm back with another episode of the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast. Our guest in this episode is Joseph Ifiegbu, Co-Founder and CEO at eqtble. Welcome to the show, Joseph. Thank you for joining me today.

Joseph Ifiegbu: Thank you so much, Susmita. How are you doing? Thanks for having me.

Susmita Sarma: Yeah, so before we start with the topic today, it would be great if you can brief us about yourself and what you do.

Joseph Ifiegbu: Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm Joseph. I am one of the co-founders and CEO of eqtble.

Susmita Sarma: Right.

Joseph Ifiegbu: eqtble is an HR technology, or HR analytics, platform. And what we do is we help organizations really understand or make sense of their people data. Right, so, I mean, these days, as you probably see, there are so many, so many tools out there in the market, so many HR tools for different things. And what we do is we connect to the different HR tools, bring the data into one place, and help tell the story about the employees. Typically, because of the amount of tools that are out there, there's this issue of silos around. So it's a tool for performance, a tool for HRIS, ATS, survey, and so many of those. And that's made it hard for companies to tell one cohesive story about their employees. And that's something we're trying to solve for.

Susmita Sarma: Right. And before eqtble also, you garnered extensive experience in the field of analytics, if I'm not wrong.

Joseph Ifiegbu: Yes, yes, yes. So eqtble was something that we thought about during our time at one of our previous companies. My background is in math and statistics, that was my educational background, and I worked as a data scientist pretty much my whole career. I'd worked in healthcare, I'd worked in research, I'd worked in sports analytics, I worked for Arsenal for a few years there. And I worked in e-commerce retail for Toys R Us as a data scientist as well. And then about five and a half years or so ago, I jumped into people analytics almost by mistake. I saw this opening in people analytics and I was curious, I didn't even quite know what people analytics was at the time. I applied on my own, and luckily I got the role at WeWork. And that was really my foray into people analytics. From there, once I got into that, I ended up building a leading team at WeWork, alongside my current co-founder, Gabe. I was there for about three years and then I left, and I went to Snap and I was there for about a year, and then I left to start eqtble.

Susmita Sarma: So it's been pretty much analytics all the time in your career, actually.

Joseph Ifiegbu: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've always loved analytics, right? It's one of those things where you're solving a problem, you're trying to surface something that isn't there. So I've always loved being in the analytics space. But being in HR analytics has been the most interesting, I thought, because you can see how the decisions that you make as an analyst, or as a data scientist, or as a leader, really affect people almost in real time.

Susmita Sarma: Yes. And as you mentioned, Joseph, HR analytics has become a necessary tool to predict different trends and ensure that business leaders make informed decisions. Moreover, data silos have become a major concern for all organizations. As we mentioned this topic today, let's first define the term. It would be great if you can explain the term data silos to our audience.

Joseph Ifiegbu: Yeah, I mean, in the simplest way possible, data silos are just data systems, or an ecosystem essentially, that are separated from each other. That's the simplest way to put it, right. They're separated and don't really talk or communicate with each other. So, for example, you could have a system that does your performance analysis, or just a performance review, and then you have a system that does your compensation, and those two systems never talk to each other. There is no connection between those two systems. And so that makes it hard, because if you were trying to tell a story that involved performance and compensation, you would have to figure out a way to download the data, or connect it, or do some sort of connection to be able to tell the story you want to tell. So that's simply what it is, that separation, and then no real way of communicating between both systems, I would say.

Susmita Sarma: So it's clearly a problem for HR.

Joseph Ifiegbu: Yeah.

Susmita Sarma: Yeah. So, as a leader in the analytics field, how do you see data silos creating challenges for HR?

Joseph Ifiegbu: Yeah, I mean, that's the best thing, right? If you look back a few years, a couple of years or so ago, there was this centralized model where pretty much you bought one tool. Let's say you bought maybe Oracle or something like that, and you used it for everything. It was your HRIS, it was your ATS, you used it for performance, you used it for the different things in HR. Particularly over the last five years, it's become quite something where now people are moving away from that centralized model to this decentralized model, where people are using these best in class tools. So now, all of a sudden, you're using, let's say, Workday for your HRIS, using Greenhouse or Lever for your ATS, and then you're using something like Lattice for your performance, and then you're using another tool for surveys and culture. You have all these different tools now that people are using for these different things, because they're trying to use the best in class. But, okay, yes, you've solved the problem of using the best in class, but you've introduced this new problem, there's now these data silos, because your people data is in Workday, but your performance is in Lattice. So if I'm trying to tell a story, how do I join these two data sets together? And so that's led to this whole thing where there's now this gap between having systems and data, and actually having insights. And that's become a problem, right? We have more data than ever before, but now we don't even know what to do with it, because the data is just sitting there, and there isn't usually an easy way to bring everything together and tell one cohesive story. So we solved one problem by introducing a new problem, and that new problem continues to compound. So that's a big problem we're starting to see now, because of this new way of doing things.

Susmita Sarma: Yeah. So, Joseph, now that we've talked about the problem, let's also talk about the solutions. How can an organization get rid of the problems related to data silos?

Joseph Ifiegbu: Yeah, I mean, one thing, what we did in my time at WeWork was, we built, that was why they hired me, and brought in Gabe and the rest of the team at that time. We had so many systems. We had Workday, Greenhouse, we had Lattice, we had a culture and engagement tool, we had quite a few tools. And these are all great tools, incredible tools, and they enabled people to do their jobs. So what we had to do was figure out a way to bring in all this data. And one of the ways, if you have the time and the money, is to build the internal solution, and that's the strategy we took. But that took us about a year and a half, and we spent about two million dollars doing this. We built all the pipelines internally, connected to all the systems, brought everything into our database, and then did all the visualization using Looker and Tableau. That's something we did. So if you have the luxury of time and money, this is always a build versus buy question. Some people will say, no, I want to build. And so we built it. However, it was in doing that, that we realized something. Myself and Gabe, we were like, look, we had the luxury of time and money to do this, but most companies don't have two million dollars sitting around to hire a team like that. So, is there a solution that can do this for companies in a very quick and cost efficient way? We started to look at it, and we started to have conversations with people in the industry, and there was nothing that really satisfied me and my colleague Gabe in what we saw. And we said, you know what, this is it, we are going to build the solution, we are going to build eqtble. And obviously, when you say you're going to build something, it takes time. It took us another one to two years to really do it. But that was what led to eqtble. We wanted to be able to connect to all these different systems, bring the data into the platform, into one generic data model, and then deliver a front end whereby you can actually tell a story about your employee base in a cost efficient way, and pretty quickly. And that's what we've managed to do over the last couple of years. So that's the solution. Problem, best in class tools lead to data silos. Solution, eqtble, cost efficient. We do all the connections, the integrations, we connect to pretty much all the main HR technology systems, and then we deliver this front end in a pretty quick way to insights, and then you can see the insight and tell the story about your employees. So that's basically what we've done.

Susmita Sarma: Brilliant. Joseph, so what I can understand is, overall with data silos, it becomes very difficult to maintain a culture of transparency and trust in the workplace.

Joseph Ifiegbu: Yeah, I mean, even without data silos, the issue of transparency and trust has always been something that companies have battled with. It's one of those things. And I think that's really more stemmed from the fact that companies are capturing all this data, and what are they doing with the data? They don't tell the employees what they're going to do with it. One of the things that I've seen done really well, that I really loved, and would recommend to companies, is something we did at Snap. When we captured data, for example, for a survey, our legal team, our executive team, HR team, made sure we stated what we're going to do with the data. We said, hey, we're capturing this survey data, and we're going to do an analysis based on these responses. It's not going to be individualized, it's just to see at a high level what the trends are, and based on the trends we will see what we need to improve upon. We gave specifics, and we said we're not going to do anything else apart from what we stated we're going to do with the data. Because of that, we got high response rates, and we did the analysis and delivered, here's what the issues were. And then leadership had conversations with the team, okay, here are the things you've said are issues, here's how we're going to fix it, here are the steps we're going to take. So letting employees hold you accountable for what you said you're going to do with the results of your survey. And then by the next round, you say, this is what we had in the last round, here are the steps we took, and we'll see improvements. We saw improvements in the survey results. So those are the things that I think help build trust. But when you just capture data and people don't know what you're doing with it, it's hard to really trust that, because you're not being transparent about what you do. So I think one of the antidotes for lack of trust is really communication, communicating, say what you're going to do, say what you're doing, and say what you did. Really, just communicating over and over again. And I think over time, that helps build employee trust, regardless of data silos. Obviously, with data silos, it's so much more now, with so much more data captured in all these different forms and formats, that even compounds the problem more. But if you communicate what you're going to do, that really helps.

Susmita Sarma: Yeah, Joseph, thank you so much for sharing this knowledge about data silos, it would be very helpful for me and for my listeners as well. So lastly, I would like to know, how do we prepare for the future of HR?

Joseph Ifiegbu: Well, no one would have predicted what would happen. We knew we were going to have this ability to work from anywhere, but in our minds it was probably about ten or twenty years out. It wasn't something we thought was going to happen so soon. But I think the pandemic really accelerated something that was already going to happen, by almost ten years at least. So now we're in a place where people are working from all parts of the world. Some people are working from beautiful places like Bali, and I'm so jealous. But I think this isn't going to change. We're not going back to the fully in office thing, that's something everyone should just accept. More and more, we're going to see new things, like we've started to see in places in Europe, this four day work week, whereby we're giving people set times to work within the week. I think there's going to be more flexibility in how people work, because people work so differently. For example, myself, I'm pretty much useless in the mornings. My brain doesn't really wake up until the afternoon or evening. So in the mornings I'm checking emails, doing meetings, and then in the afternoon and evening is really when I start to work. So this set schedule of nine to five is really going to change. And I think people should just embrace that. And more and more, it's almost like a gig economy, where people are going to be working more on projects, as opposed to this set idea of, you work for one company and that's it. I think you're going to see more and more people engage in different projects, work for a company to do a project, and then move on to the next one. There's going to be more flexibility in how people work. I mean, that's just a natural evolution of how people work. This isn't the way we worked fifty or sixty years ago. It's changed, and I think it's going to keep evolving. That's something I can see for the future.

Susmita Sarma: Nice. So in one line, it would be a lot of flexibility in doing your work, and not being tied to one project, without hampering your productivity.

Joseph Ifiegbu: Absolutely, that's exactly what it is.

Susmita Sarma: Right. So what would be your suggestions for our listeners today, Joseph?

Joseph Ifiegbu: I think, just keep an open mind. I think one of the enemies of progress is the mentality of, this is how things have always been done, so we're always going to do it like this. It's such a bad mentality to have. Things change, situations change. So my advice would just be, keep an open mind, keep having conversations with people, and stay adaptable. Just be adaptable to change. I really think that's one of the best ways to grow. So that would be my advice.

Susmita Sarma: Brilliant. Lastly, how can our listeners reach out to you?

Joseph Ifiegbu: I mean, LinkedIn, Twitter, it's pretty much the same everywhere, LinkedIn, Twitter, email. It's all really the same. So feel free to ping me on LinkedIn as well, that's where I'm mostly active. I'll pretty much respond, and we can go from there. I love to chat about anything HR analytics or people analytics related, love to help out any way I can. So feel free to reach out.

Susmita Sarma: It was great talking to you, Joseph. Thanks for joining me today, and thanks for being a part of the Vantage HR Influencers podcast.

Joseph Ifiegbu: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

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